Download Cisco Wide Area Application Services Software Version 5.4

Technical Overview
Cisco Wide Area Application Services Software
Version 5.4
What You Will Learn
Enterprises face numerous challenges in the delivery of applications and critical business data to the enterprise
edge. As the global workforce continues to become more distributed, providing adequate service levels throughout
the organization becomes increasingly difficult, causing IT departments to deploy costly and difficult-to-manage
infrastructure at each location, including file services, email, video, software distribution, and print services. With
continuous pressure from industry and federal regulation, IT departments now face the significant challenge of
consolidating this costly infrastructure into the data center, public clouds, or onto scalable, virtualized branch-office
application-delivery platforms to improve data protection, security, and availability, while maintaining the service
level that the distributed workforce has come to expect.
Furthermore, as applications continue to become more complex and robust, delivering applications and application
information to the enterprise edge becomes increasingly challenging and expensive. In today's environment, IT
managers face increasing pressure to reduce application-delivery costs over the WAN while helping ensure
application availability and agility with the adoption of virtualization and cloud computing. However, poor application
response time experienced by users in remote sites is often cited as one of the main inhibitors of cloud adoption.
The latency of the WAN or Internet link between the data center and cloud location and the user at the remote site
adversely affects the performance of business applications. A solution to the application performance challenge is
to make WAN optimization a part of the cloud infrastructure.
As discussed in this document, Cisco® Wide Area Application Services (WAAS) accelerates applications and data
over the WAN, optimizes bandwidth, and empowers public and private cloud services, all with industry-leading
network integration. Cisco WAAS allows IT departments to centralize applications and storage while maintaining
productivity for branch-office and mobile users.
Challenge
IT budgets are not increasing to match the growing expectations that executives have for IT resources. Almost
every IT department that manages a distributed infrastructure wants to consolidate costly remote-office
infrastructure into the data center or onto scalable, virtual branch-office application-delivery devices to control
capital expenditures (CapEx) and operating expenses (OpEx). Furthermore, as applications continue to evolve and
become larger and more complex, the network load grows and the performance characteristics of the WAN affect
application delivery even more. The challenges of data-retention policies and business-continuance, disasterrecovery, and compliance requirements exacerbate the problem, given a heavily distributed infrastructure and
already overburdened WAN environment.
A centralized IT infrastructure allows CapEx and OpEx savings while streamlining data-protection processes. Many
vendors have attempted to solve such problems with single-purpose products that do not effectively allow IT
departments to take advantage of existing investment in network intelligence. Furthermore, cloud-based models
are likely to change the consumption model for technology, allowing enterprises to increase their business agility
and save costs through on-demand provisioning and deprovisioning of infrastructure and services using a utilitybased chargeback model.
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Cisco WAAS Solution for the WAN
Cisco WAAS delivers a comprehensive, cost-effective, cloud-ready WAN optimization solution. Cisco WAAS
accelerates applications, optimizes bandwidth, provides local hosting of branch-office IT services, and enables a
smooth evolution to cloud-based services. Cisco WAAS improves end-user productivity by accelerating application
delivery and improves IT staff productivity by simplifying service integration, while maintaining a low total cost of
ownership (TCO) and increasing business agility with network integration. Cisco WAAS enables organizations to
accomplish crucial business objectives such as these:
●
Enhance productivity by mitigating the effects of WAN latency. Applications perform better, and data is
transferred faster.
●
Offer a superior end-user application experience by enabling multimedia applications and live and ondemand video streaming with high performance without affecting the performance of other applications
across the WAN.
●
Allow migration of business applications to the cloud and deliver high-performance cloud services and
software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications without affecting application performance for end users at remote
branch offices, campuses, and data centers.
●
Reduce bandwidth consumption, delaying or eliminating increased recurring bandwidth costs. Cisco WAAS
enables IT consolidation, reducing both CapEx and recurring expenses for branch-office IT infrastructure.
●
Lower operating costs by providing on-demand WAN optimization with integration into Cisco Integrated
Services Routers Generation 2 (ISR G2) routers through Cisco IOS® Software on Cisco WAAS Express,
Cisco WAAS on Cisco Services-Ready Engine (SRE) Modules, and Cisco UCS® E-Series Servers.
Figure 1 shows a typical customer deployment using Cisco WAAS.
Figure 1.
Cisco WAAS Deployment Architecture
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Cisco WAAS is deployed on a physical appliance, virtual appliance, router-integrated services module, or routerintegrated Cisco IOS Software on each side of the WAN to provide application-specific acceleration and WAN
optimization capabilities. You can deploy Cisco WAAS Appliances out of the data path or physically in-path in the
data center or in the remote branch office, and you can deploy Cisco WAAS network modules as well as service
modules out-of-path in the branch office. Regardless of the deployment model, Cisco WAAS provides application
performance improvements and enables centralization without compromising high availability and scalability by
providing intelligent load distribution and fail-through operation.
Figure 2 shows how Cisco WAAS devices, deployed on each end of a WAN link, optimize application traffic by
using optimized connections over the WAN.
Figure 2.
Cisco WAAS Optimizes Connections over the WAN
Cisco WAAS allows IT departments to:
●
Consolidate and virtualize data centers
●
Deliver desktop virtualization
●
Deploy new, multimedia applications
●
Deliver high-performance cloud services and SaaS applications
●
Optimize organization branch-office sites with reduced network and IT infrastructure
●
Optimize bandwidth for multimedia and telepresence services
●
Manage bandwidth expenses
●
Protect remote data and help ensure business continuity for regulatory compliance
Cisco WAAS facilitates such benefits through a series of optimizations that are not only safe for all applications, but
also validated by the application vendors themselves while also being transparent to clients, servers, and the
network itself:
●
Application-vendor-validated protocol-specific acceleration: Cisco WAAS provides application-specific
acceleration features that are validated by application vendors themselves for both encrypted and
unencrypted applications. These techniques for improving application performance over the WAN reduce
the effects of latency and bandwidth use through protocol acceleration, read-ahead optimization, operation
batching, multiplexing, and safe caching. The result is full compliance with the protocol specification, full
coherency of data, and a dramatically improved user experience when compared with native WAN access.
Applications include Microsoft file services (Common Internet File System [CIFS]) and Microsoft Exchange
Messaging API Remote Procedure Call [MAPI-RPC]), plus numerous other application protocols.
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●
Advanced protocol-agnostic WAN optimization: Cisco WAAS provides powerful WAN optimization
capabilities that overcome limitations associated with the movement of data over the WAN. Cisco WAAS
can compress data in flight using long-lived compression techniques including standards-based
compression and Context-Aware Data Redundancy Elimination (DRE). Coupled with TCP optimizations that
enable more intelligent and high-performance use of the network, the result is a significant reduction in
network bandwidth consumption, more efficient network use, improved application throughput, and LAN-like
performance for remote-office users and inter-data center applications.
With Cisco WAAS, almost every TCP-based application can benefit from the network and application-specific
acceleration techniques, including Internet and intranet, database, file service, file transfer, email, data protection,
virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI), client-server, data protection, video streaming and video-on-demand (VoD),
and SSL-encrypted applications.
Figure 3 shows the Cisco WAAS new-generation Cisco Wide Area Virtualization Engine (WAVE) appliances and
high-performance connectivity options.
Figure 3.
Cisco WAAS WAVE Appliances and Connectivity Options
WAN Optimization with Cisco WAAS
Cisco WAAS provides numerous WAN optimization capabilities that help improve application performance and
mitigate the need for costly WAN bandwidth upgrades. By employing a series of techniques ranging from TCP
optimization to advanced cross-protocol data suppression, all working together, Cisco WAAS helps ensure that
application data traverses the WAN more efficiently, thereby improving application performance and user
productivity. Additionally, you can apply these capabilities to plain-text or SSL-encrypted traffic, thereby allowing
you to improve productivity and performance for critical enterprise applications.
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Figure 4 summarizes the WAN optimization capabilities of Cisco WAAS.
Figure 4.
Effects of Cisco WAAS WAN Optimization Features
Transport Flow Optimization
The Cisco WAAS Transport Flow Optimization (TFO) feature provides optimizations that help improve TCP
behavior under problematic WAN conditions to meet challenges associated with packet loss, congestion, recovery,
and long fan networks (LFNs). With Cisco WAAS TFO, communicating nodes are shielded from WAN conditions,
and Cisco WAAS devices manage WAN conditions on behalf of the nodes to help ensure that available capacity
can be used advantageously, the effect of packet loss and congestion is mitigated, and throughput is increased.
TFO maintains packet-network friendliness and safe coexistence with other network nodes communicating using
standard TCP implementations. TFO provides adaptive buffering to help ensure that connections requiring
additional memory to achieve higher throughput are automatically given appropriate system resources without
compromising fairness among other optimized and nonoptimized connections. Optimizations provided as part of
TFO include large initial windows, advanced congestion-avoidance algorithms, and slow-start mitigation.
Figure 5 shows how the Cisco WAAS device acts as a TCP proxy to shield communicating nodes from WAN
conditions and employs other optimizations, including the Cisco WAAS DRE and Persistent Lempel-Ziv (PLZ)
compression features.
Figure 5.
Cisco WAAS TFO
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Figure 6 shows the benefits of Cisco WAAS TFO for TCP behavior and application performance of TCP-based
applications.
Figure 6.
Cisco WAAS TFO Enables Efficient Use and Improves Application Performance
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Data Redundancy Elimination
Cisco WAAS DRE is a Context-Aware DRE implementation that includes application intelligence and inspects TCP
traffic to identify redundant data patterns at the byte level and then quickly replaces them with signatures if they
have been previously seen so that the peer Cisco WAAS device can use them to reproduce the original data.
There are two types of data traffic:
●
Transactional: Transactional traffic moves between the client and the server on the same TCP connection
and includes email send and receive traffic and file uploads and downloads. Typically, all traditional client
and server application traffic is in this category.
●
Directional: Directional traffic tends to travel in only one direction on the same TCP connection. Examples
are traffic from VDI screen scrapping, video streams, and cloud-based applications such as backup. This
type of traffic flow represents a new trend in applications.
Emerging applications require new approaches to DRE architecture, so Cisco WAAS has introduced three modes
of Context-Aware DRE:
●
Bidirectional DRE: Data chunks and signatures are written to the disk on both the sender- and receiver-side
Cisco WAVE appliances to provide optimal compression.
●
Unidirectional DRE: Only signatures are written on the sender-side Cisco WAVE, and both signatures and
data chunks are written on the disk on the receiver-side Cisco WAVE. In addition to providing optimal
compression, this mode effectively uses the DRE cache for higher scalability.
●
Adaptive DRE: Context-Aware DRE intelligently chooses between the bidirectional and unidirectional DRE
caching mechanisms according to the type of application traffic.
Context-Aware DRE also stores signatures in the data center (headend) Cisco WAVE on a per-branch-office basis,
and the actual data chunks are shared across branch offices. The tight synchronization of branch-office signatures
combined with shared chunks of data across branch offices helps provide consistent, reliable, and fair DRE
performance for all branch offices. Figure 7 shows the architecture of Cisco WAAS Context-Aware Adaptive DRE.
Figure 7.
Cisco WAAS Context-Aware Adaptive DRE
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PLZ Compression
Cisco WAAS implements PLZ compression with a connection-oriented compression history to further reduce the
amount of bandwidth consumed by a TCP connection. You can use PLZ compression in conjunction with DRE or
independently. It provides up to an additional 5:1 compression, depending on the application used and the data
transmitted, in addition to any compression that DRE offers.
SSL Optimization
Cisco WAAS provides SSL optimization capabilities that integrate transparently with existing data center key
management and trust models that both WAN optimization and application acceleration components can use.
Encryption key pairs are stored securely in a secure vault on Cisco WAAS Central Manager and distributed
securely to the Cisco WAAS devices in the data center to be stored in a secure vault.
Figure 8 shows how Cisco WAAS SSL optimization integrates transparently with existing application key
exchanges and preserves the trust boundaries of server private keys.
Figure 8.
Cisco WAAS SSL Optimization
Other solutions provide only partial integration into existing security architectures. Cisco WAAS SSL optimization
provides the following advantages over older WAN optimization solutions that provide SSL support:
●
Preservation of trust boundary: Cisco WAAS does not distribute private keys beyond the data center Cisco
WAAS devices.
●
Secure storage of keys: All certificates and private keys are stored securely on Cisco WAAS Central
Manager.
●
Interoperability with existing proxy infrastructure: Cisco WAAS provides full support for automatic
identification, interception, optimization, and acceleration of SSL traffic, even in environments in which web
proxies have already been deployed or clients are configured to use explicit proxies.
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●
Client authentication support: Cisco WAAS provides full support for client certificate-based authentication
during initial session establishment.
●
Online certificate status protocol support: By providing support for the Online Certificate Status Protocol
(OSCP), Cisco WAAS can provide a real-time security check of certificates to improve security.
●
SSL services on the SaaS provider cloud: Cisco WAAS can simplify the configuration needed to handle the
large numbers of IP addresses and IP address changes required by SSL services hosted through a thirdparty SaaS provider cloud.
●
HTTP optimization techniques: Cisco WAAS SSL optimization uses HTTP optimization techniques such as
local HTTP responses through the metadata cache, DRE hints, and server compression offload. Refer to
the section HTTP Acceleration later in this document for more information.
Citrix XenDesktop and XenApp Optimization
Cisco WAAS is a Citrix Ready certified solution that helps ensure a high-quality user experience for Citrix
XenDesktop and XenApp. The solution - which is jointly tested, validated, and supported by Cisco and Citrix provides optimization transparently, requiring no changes to existing Citrix infrastructure. Figure 9 shows the
components of Cisco optimization for Citrix XenDesktop and XenApp solutions.
●
Citrix XenDesktop delivers desktops and applications hosted on virtualized infrastructure in the data center.
●
Cisco WAAS, deployed on both sides of the WAN, optimizes Citrix HDX traffic between end users and the
data center using a sophisticated combination of TCP optimizations that reduce the effects of the WAN,
persistent session-based compression, and sophisticated algorithms to reduce data redundancy in Citrix
HDX traffic.
●
Cisco WAAS Central Manager is used to manage the Cisco WAAS solution from a central point, reducing
operation burdens and costs.
Figure 9.
Cisco Optimization for Citrix XenDesktop and XenApp Solution Components
The Cisco WAAS with Citrix XenDesktop and XenApp solution offers the following benefits:
●
Full support for Citrix XenDesktop and XenApp: Cisco WAAS optimization techniques are applicable to
Citrix XenDesktop and XenApp deployments.
●
Transparency to Citrix encryption: You can transparently insert Cisco WAAS into encrypted communications
(Basic and RC5) without requiring changes to the Citrix configuration or infrastructure.
●
Full compatibility with Citrix MultiStream Independent Computing Architecture (ICA; MSI): The solution also
includes the capability to apply differentiated-services-code-point (DSCP) tagging of both MSI and non-MSI
ICA and Citrix Common Gateway Protocol (CGP) traffic.
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●
Full compatibility with Citrix Session Reliability (CGP): The solution also includes enhanced optimization for
CGP.
●
Full compatibility with Citrix HDX MediaStream: Citrix HDX MediaStream exposes the media stream, which
enables Cisco WAAS optimization of the streaming media protocol.
●
Full compatibility with ICA over SSL: Cisco WAAS identifies ICA inside SSL and provides the optimization
while maintaining the SSL connection between the client and Citrix Access Gateway without the need for
any configuration changes to the client or server.
●
Context-Aware DRE: Directional understanding of data enables best performance as well as increased
bandwidth savings as a result of improved compression.
Cisco Intelligent WAN with Akamai Connect
Cisco Intelligent WAN (IWAN) with Akamai Connect is a fully integrated solution from Cisco and Akamai that
provides next-generation application and network optimization. It integrates best-in-class advanced WAN
optimization and intelligent caching techniques directly into the Cisco ISR with Application Experience (ISR-AX) at
the branch office. It effectively extends the Akamai Intelligent Platform across the last mile from the Internet directly
into the branch office with edge caching, thus significantly offloading traffic from the WAN and providing an
outstanding user experience over bandwidth-constrained networks. Akamai Connect provides faster content
delivery regardless of device, connectivity, or cloud, including the corporate private cloud and the public Internet
cloud, which most business traffic traverses. Figure 10 shows the deployment scenarios for Akamai Connect.
●
Akamai Connect integrates Akamai’s industry-leading HTTP caching technology into Cisco WAAS to further
enhance branch-office users’ application experiences.
●
Cisco WAAS can be deployed on both ends of the WAN or in a single-sided direct-to-Internet scenario to
provided performance improvement regardless of where the HTTP traffic flows.
●
Cisco WAAS Central Manager provides a single point of configuration and management. Cisco WAAS
Central Manager provides an intuitive, web-based management console for administering features,
monitoring performance, and reporting on bandwidth savings.
Figure 10.
Extending Akamai Intelligence to the Branch Office with Akamai Connect
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Akamai Connect provides the following HTTP caching techniques to increase the possibility of a cache hit and thus
improve end-user performance (Figure 11 shows an example):
●
Transparent cache: Akamai’s high-performance HTTP object cache provides the capability to locally cache
HTTP-based content for LAN-like performance, regardless of whether the web application was served from
the private corporate cloud or the public Internet. Transparent caching has three modes, which can be
configured at the global, domain, or host level:
◦ Basic: This mode caches only objects with explicit caching directives, and obeys any client directives.
◦ Standard: This mode is the default mode. It obeys any server caching directives, but also makes
intelligent caching decisions for objects that do not have caching directives.
◦ Advanced: This mode also obeys any caching directives and makes intelligent caching decisions about
the objects to be cached, but it provides a more aggressive algorithm than Standard mode and is
typically well suited for media-intensive objects.
●
Akamai Connected Cache: Akamai’s proprietary caching rules and connection with the edge servers of the
Akamai Intelligent Platform provide the capability to cache and deliver content within the branch office for
traffic that may otherwise be deemed noncacheable. This content may be an enterprise’s own web content
or any content that is delivered by the Akamai Intelligent Platform, which is up to 30 percent of all web
traffic, representing most business web traffic.
●
Dynamic URL HTTP cache (over-the-top cache): The high-performance object-level cache from Akamai
provides the capability to cache HTTP content served from dynamically generated URLs and content
normally not cacheable, such as YouTube videos, often used today for product demonstrations and
advertisements displayed in stores on digital signage, employee training, etc.
Content prepositioning for enhanced end-user experience: Content prepositioning allows organizations to
define policies to proactively fetch content on a specific schedule. By warming the HTTP web cache during
nonpeak times, organizations can improve application performance and increase network offload when the
network is busiest. Examples include training videos, product demonstrations, and product catalogs.
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Figure 11.
Reduced Webpage Load Times with Akamai Connect
Application Acceleration with Cisco WAAS
Cisco WAAS provides application-specific acceleration capabilities that, unlike competitive solutions, have been
approved by the application vendors themselves. Along with reducing the negative effects of latency and
bandwidth and providing tremendous improvements in response time and performance, Cisco WAAS application
acceleration offers the reassurance that the vendors that produce the applications being optimized fully support the
acceleration capabilities of Cisco WAAS. Application-acceleration capabilities provided in Cisco WAAS work in
conjunction with WAN optimization features and help mitigate the negative effects of the WAN by providing safe
caching, protocol acceleration, message batching, read-ahead optimization, write-behind optimization, stream
splitting, and more. Cisco WAAS supports a broad range of applications accelerated through application-specific
support, including CIFS, Microsoft Windows Print Services, Network File System (NFS), MAPI, HTTP, Secure
HTTP (HTTPS), and enterprise video.
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Figure 12 shows how Cisco WAAS application acceleration improves application performance while offloading
servers and preserving application semantics.
Figure 12.
Cisco WAAS Application Acceleration
Figure 13 shows the typical and peak performance improvements provided by Cisco WAAS.
Figure 13.
Typical and Peak Performance Improvements Provided by Cisco WAAS
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CIFS, Microsoft Windows Print, and Server Message Block Acceleration
Cisco WAAS 5.4 continues to improve performance and simplify operations for CIFS and Server Message Block
(SMB) traffic. This improvement allows IT departments to continue to simplify their file and print services offering by
centralizing in them in the data center without compromising performance. Cisco WAAS Software provides
acceleration for SMB Version 2 (SMBv2) and signed SMBv2 protocols.
Cisco WAAS can provide the following acceleration capabilities for CIFS:
●
Safe data and metadata caching: By caching copies of objects and metadata, Cisco WAAS can reduce the
transmission of CIFS data over the WAN, thereby providing tremendous levels of optimization for branchoffice users accessing file servers in the data center. All data is validated against the server for coherency
to help ensure that a user never receives out-of-date (stale) data.
●
Read-ahead processing: For situations in which objects are not cached or cannot be cached, Cisco WAAS
employs read-ahead optimization to bring the data to the user more quickly. Read-ahead processing
reduces the negative effects of latency on CIFS by requesting the data on behalf of the user. This data can
then be used, when safe, to respond to the user on behalf of the server.
●
Message pipelining: CIFS messages can be pipelined over the WAN to mitigate the effects of the send-andwait behavior of CIFS. This feature allows operations to occur in parallel rather than serially, thus improving
performance for the user.
●
Prepositioning: File server data and metadata can be copied in a scheduled manner to improve
performance for first-user access. This feature is helpful in environments in which large objects must
traverse the WAN, including software distribution, video, and desktop-management applications.
●
Microsoft Windows printing acceleration: Cisco WAAS can intelligently accelerate CIFS printing traffic over
the WAN to allow centralization of print services in the data center. This feature helps reduce the branchoffice infrastructure without compromising printing performance and is transparent to the existing printer and
queue-management architectures.
●
Intelligent file server offloading: Cisco WAAS CIFS acceleration reduces the burden placed on the origin file
server through advanced caching techniques that can serve data locally to the requesting user when the
user is authenticated and authorized and the cached contents are validated as coherent with the origin file
server. Thus, file servers see fewer requests and are required to transfer less data, thereby enabling file
server scalability and better economics.
●
Invalid-file-ID processing: Cisco WAAS can deny requests to access files with invalid file-handle values
locally instead of having to send the requests to the server, thus improving performance for the user.
●
Batch close optimization: Cisco WAAS can perform asynchronous file-close optimization for file-sharing
traffic.
●
Signed SMBv2 processing: SMBv2 message signing is supported.
HTTP Acceleration
Oracle, SAP, Microsoft SharePoint, and other applications are central to today’s enterprises. Cisco WAAS provides
acceleration capabilities for enterprise applications that use HTTP, reducing bandwidth consumption and improving
WAN efficiency and also mitigating the negative effects of latency in the WAN for these applications. By employing
latency mitigation capabilities along with powerful WAN optimization capabilities, organizations can achieve a
substantial increase in the responsiveness of enterprise applications accessed over the WAN, greatly enhancing
branch-office user productivity.
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Cisco WAAS provides the following acceleration capabilities for enterprise applications:
●
Fast connection reuse: Connection reuse decreases the load time for complex pages or pages with
numerous embedded objects when the client or server cannot use persistent connections. Optimized
connections on the WAN remain active for a short time period so that they can be reused if additional data
between the client-server pair needs to be exchanged.
●
Connection multiplexing: Rather than requiring that multiple connections be established between clientserver pairs, connections established between clients and servers are reused. This feature eliminates the
latency caused by the process of establishing multiple connections between clients and servers.
●
Local response: Use of cached metadata allows Cisco WAAS branch-office devices to respond locally to
certain HTTP requests. These local responses are based on cached metadata from previously seen server
responses and are continuously updated. This powerful HTTP optimization feature greatly reduces protocol
chattiness and helps improve application response times through faster page downloads.
●
Enhanced Microsoft SharePoint: Cisco WAAS optimization for Microsoft SharePoint provides specific
optimization benefits for Microsoft Office documents hosted on a 2010 Microsoft SharePoint Server. The
Microsoft SharePoint feature provides optimization by prefetching objects for Microsoft Word and Excel and
storing them in the Cisco WAAS metadata cache. This optimization saves round-trip time (RTT) for each
successful fetch to reduce latency from the client’s point of view and improve the overall user experience.
●
Content-aware optimization: The Cisco WAAS advanced HTTP parser provides intelligent
recommendations that make DRE more effective and enable offloading of compression from the server
resources.
MAPI Acceleration
Microsoft Exchange email relies on MAPI, used over RPCs, to deliver email, calendaring, contacts, and more to
Microsoft Outlook users for collaboration and productivity. As with many applications, the performance of Microsoft
Exchange is hampered by the bandwidth limitations and latency in the WAN. Cisco WAAS provides many
acceleration services for Microsoft Exchange to help improve performance. Unlike other solutions that provide
acceleration for Microsoft Exchange, Cisco WAAS acceleration is developed in conjunction with Microsoft to help
ensure correctness and compatibility with all major versions of the application, without relying on reverse
engineering of protocols.
Cisco WAAS provides the following acceleration capabilities for Microsoft Exchange:
●
Full application support: Cisco WAAS acceleration for Microsoft Exchange is developed in conjunction with
Microsoft to help ensure full compatibility with all major versions, including Microsoft Outlook 2000, 2003,
and 2007 and the same versions of Microsoft Exchange.
●
Advanced email compression: Cisco WAAS can automatically defer native compression provided by the
Microsoft Exchange Server and Microsoft Outlook in favor of Cisco WAAS DRE and PLZ compression.
Additionally, Cisco WAAS can natively decode messages encoded by Microsoft Exchange or Outlook to
provide additional levels of compression, and full data coherency is preserved end to end.
●
Object read-ahead optimization: Objects being fetched from the server, such as email, calendar items, and
address books, are fetched at an accelerated rate because Cisco WAAS prefetches objects on behalf of the
user. This feature helps mitigate the effects of the send-and-wait behavior of Microsoft Exchange and
Outlook.
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●
Object delivery acceleration: Objects being sent to the server, such as email, folder updates, and calendar
entries, are sent at an accelerated rate because of the pipelining and batching capabilities provided by
Cisco WAAS.
●
Payload aggregation: Cisco WAAS recognizes many Microsoft Exchange messages that are small and can
either batch them for optimized delivery or dynamically adjust DRE and PLZ compression to improve
compression ratios for these messages.
●
Transparent integration: Cisco WAAS acceleration for Microsoft Exchange does not keep user sessions
open as in other solutions, a situation that can lead to security vulnerabilities and limit the overall scalability
of the Microsoft Exchange Server itself.
Encrypted MAPI Optimization
Cisco WAAS provides Encrypted MAPI (E-MAPI) optimization that integrates transparently with the existing
Microsoft Active Directory trust model and allows Layer 7 optimization for encrypted communications using
proprietary Microsoft encrypted RPC protocols. Figure 14 shows how Cisco WAAS E-MAPI optimization integrates
transparently with the trust model while preserving user-intended boundaries and security goals.
Figure 14.
Cisco WAAS E-MAPI Optimization
Other solutions provide only partial integration with the network security architecture. Cisco WAAS E-MAPI
optimization provides a complete and cohesive solution to meet user-defined security objectives and offers the
following advantages:
●
It maintains trust boundaries and does not distribute the private keys of the data center.
●
Keys are dynamically retrieved from Active Directory on demand and are never permanently stored on any
Cisco WAAS device.
●
E-MAPI acceleration interoperates transparently for all network interception methods and does not require
special handling.
●
Application transparency allows E-MAPI acceleration without the need to make changes to application
clients or application servers.
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●
Microsoft Outlook 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, and 2013 are supported (supporting a mix of encrypted and
unencrypted traffic).
NFS Acceleration
Cisco WAAS provides robust protocol acceleration for UNIX environments in which the NFS protocol is used for file
exchange. In conjunction with the powerful WAN optimization capabilities provided by Cisco WAAS, NFS
acceleration helps improve file access performance - both interactive access and access during file transfer - by
mitigating the negative effects of latency and bandwidth constraints.
The capabilities for NFS acceleration provided by Cisco WAAS include:
●
Metadata optimization: Cisco WAAS pipelines interactive operations such as directory traversal to reduce
the amount of time required to traverse directories and view file and directory metadata. Additionally, Cisco
WAAS caches metadata when safe to do so, to reduce the number of performance-limiting operations that
traverse the WAN.
●
Read-ahead optimization: Cisco WAAS performs read-ahead optimization on behalf of the requesting node
to prefetch data from the file being accessed. This feature makes the data readily available at the edge
device for faster read throughput.
●
File-write optimization: Asynchronous write operations are used to batch write messages and eliminate the
send-and-wait behavior of NFS file write operations while working in conjunction with existing NFS protocol
semantics to help ensure file data integrity.
Video Delivery Services
One of the most challenging applications to deploy enterprisewide is business video, including streaming video
(live video) and VoD. Cisco WAAS provides a series of optimizations that help improve video delivery and meet the
challenges normally present when deploying video enterprisewide. Cisco WAAS video-delivery services reduce the
burden that video places on the network while providing an architecture that helps ensure high-quality broadcast
performance and playback for remote users.
Figure 15 shows the effects of Cisco WAAS video-delivery services on user performance, WAN bandwidth, and
server scalability.
Figure 15.
Cisco WAAS Video-Delivery Services
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Cisco WAAS provides the following optimizations for video delivery:
●
Microsoft Windows Media stream splitting: Cisco WAAS interoperates with Microsoft Windows Media
Technologies (WMT) over the Real Time Streaming Protocol (RTSP) to enable one video stream over the
WAN to be served to numerous users in the remote branch office, thereby reducing bandwidth consumption
by video traffic.
●
Data reduction and optimization for non-WMT and non-RTSP video: Cisco WAAS provides WAN
optimization and bandwidth reduction for other video formats, including video over HTTP, Adobe Flash,
Apple QuickTime, RealVideo, and any other video protocol that uses TCP as a transport.
●
VoD caching: You can use Cisco WAAS CIFS acceleration in conjunction with prepositioning to provide a
powerful VoD delivery architecture for enterprise e-learning, training, and video message archiving and
playback.
●
Intelligent video server offloading: Cisco WAAS video-delivery services reduce the burden on the origin
video server by intelligently multiplexing remote-user requests over a single connection per location. Thus,
video servers see fewer connections and are required to serve less data, thereby enabling video server
scalability.
Cisco Virtual WAAS: The First Cloud-Ready WAN Optimization Solution
Cisco Virtual WAAS (vWAAS) is the industry’s first cloud-ready WAN optimization solution. Cisco vWAAS is a
virtual appliance that accelerates business applications delivered from private and virtual private cloud
infrastructure, helping ensure an optimal user experience. Cisco vWAAS runs on the VMware ESXi hypervisor and
Cisco Unified Computing System™ (Cisco UCS®) x86 servers, providing an agile, elastic, and multitenant
deployment.
Cisco vWAAS is the only WAN optimization solution that is deployed in an application-specific, virtualization-aware,
and on-demand manner. Using policy-based configuration in the Cisco Nexus® 1000V Switch, Cisco vWAAS
service is associated with application server virtual machines as they are instantiated or moved. This approach
enables cloud providers to offer rapid delivery of WAN optimization services with little network configuration or
disruption in cloud-based environments.
Cisco IOS Software WAN Optimization Solution on Cisco ISR G2 Routers with Cisco WAAS
Express
Cisco WAAS Express extends the Cisco WAAS product portfolio with a small-footprint, cost-effective solution
based on Cisco IOS Software and integrated into Cisco ISR G2 routers to offer bandwidth optimization and
application-acceleration capabilities. Cisco WAAS Express increases remote-user productivity, reduces WAN
bandwidth costs, and offers investment protection by interoperating with existing Cisco WAAS infrastructure. Cisco
WAAS Express is unique in providing network transparency, improving deployment flexibility with on-demand
service enablement, and integrating with native Cisco IOS Software services such as security, Cisco NetFlow, and
quality of service (QoS). Furthermore, no inline or Web Cache Communication Protocol (WCCP) interception
mechanisms need to be configured. As soon as the feature is enabled for a specific interface, the default
optimization policy will apply to traffic entering and leaving the interface. Cisco WAAS Express uses a combination
of TFO, LZ compression, and DRE caching to optimize traffic, and it provides selected application support for file,
web, and SSL traffic.
© 2015 Cisco and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public Information.
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Simple, Scalable, Secure Network Integration with Cisco WAAS
Cisco WAAS offers the industry’s most complete set of network integration capabilities that preserve investment in
existing networking architecture without compromising scalability or network stability. You can deploy Cisco WAAS
devices as router-integrated network modules, providing the industry’s lowest TCO for the branch office. With their
impressive scalability for the data center, Cisco WAAS devices offer industry-leading density and lower power,
cooling, and rack-space costs when compared to alternative solutions.
Transparency
Cisco WAAS provides network transparency for both the LAN and the WAN to help ensure investment protection
for network services that have already been deployed, are under consideration for deployment, or may be
deployed in the future. By preserving packet header information, including IP addresses (source and destination)
and port numbers (source and destination), value-added network services can continue operation even in the
presence of the optimization and acceleration capabilities that Cisco WAAS provides.
Figure 16 shows how Cisco WAAS transparency preserves packet header information.
Figure 16.
Cisco WAAS Transparency Preserves Packet Header Information
Cisco WAAS transparency helps ensure compatibility with services including the following:
●
Network QoS: Cisco WAAS preserves DSCP markings, or alternatively can apply DSCP markings through
application QoS, working together with classification, policing, and shaping in the network. Network
classification is preserved because the header information is not manipulated, thereby enabling Cisco
WAAS to interoperate with network-based classification techniques for QoS. Figure 17 shows how you can
deploy Cisco WAAS in conjunction with network QoS.
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Figure 17.
●
Cisco WAAS Complements Network QoS
Dynamic routing: Cisco WAAS interoperates transparently with dynamic routing technologies such as
Performance Routing (PfR), Optimized Edge Routing (OER), and Policy-Based Routing (PBR).
●
Access control: Cisco WAAS interoperates transparently with access control lists (ACLs) and Cisco firewall
policies to block certain types of traffic from traversing network devices.
●
Cisco NetFlow and performance monitoring tools: Cisco WAAS interoperates transparently with Cisco
NetFlow and other performance tools to help ensure full visibility into the traffic encountered on the network.
Additionally, Cisco WAAS integrates transparently with application performance monitoring solutions such as Cisco
Network Analysis Module (NAM) Products, CA NetQoS SuperAgent, Visual Networks Visual Performance Manager
(VPM), InfoVista 5View Service Data Manager (SDM), OPNET AppResponse Xpert, and Compuware Vantage.
Other WAN optimization and application acceleration solutions mask the actual performance that clients and
servers encounter because of the local acknowledgment of TCP segments. Cisco WAAS also provides such a TCP
proxy, but you can configure it to inform both Cisco NAM and NetQoS SuperAgent of otherwise masked connection
details to allow you to retain full view of the exact performance that users and servers encounter. Cisco NAM can
export the performance information to third-party performance management tools. Additionally, with the
introduction of Cisco Performance Agent in Cisco IOS Software Release 15.1(4)M, a Cisco ISR G2 router can
report the same application performance and optimization metrics and export the data through Cisco Flexible
NetFlow to Cisco NAM and third-party monitoring systems. As a result, customers gain comprehensive application
performance and WAN optimization visibility, independent of the Cisco WAAS form factor.
Cisco WAAS Central Manager includes integrated performance monitoring capabilities that integrate the Cisco
NAM reports that are most relevant to Cisco WAAS deployment. This feature simplifies the configuration and
monitoring processes, expands reporting capabilities beyond Cisco WAAS visibility to the entire network, and
provides end-to-end application performance analytics and optimization statistics.
© 2015 Cisco and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public Information.
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Security
Cisco WAAS provides the industry’s only secure WAN optimization solution in that it allows transparent
interoperability with existing security technologies and devices. Whereas other solutions that are either
nontransparent or nonintegrated require security posture changes to support optimization, only Cisco WAAS helps
ensure full compatibility and preservation of your security posture.
Figure 18 shows the components of Cisco WAAS and secure WAN optimization.
Figure 18.
Cisco WAAS and Secure WAN Optimization
Following are a few capabilities of the Cisco WAAS secure WAN optimization solution:
●
Full integration with Cisco firewalls: Cisco firewall devices and software, including Cisco IOS Firewall, the
Cisco Catalyst® 6500 Series Firewall Services Module (FWSM), Cisco PIX® Firewall Software, and Cisco
ASA 5500 Series Adaptive Security Appliances Enterprise Firewall Edition, are all Cisco WAAS aware and
can identify flows that are optimized by Cisco WAAS. This behavior helps ensure that new service ports do
not need to be open and that stateful inspection is not compromised.
●
Full integration with Cisco Intrusion Detection System (IDS) and Intrusion Prevention System (IPS): Cisco
IDS and IPS devices recognize flows optimized by Cisco WAAS and eliminate the false positives that
plague competitive WAN optimization and application acceleration solutions deployed in networks with
signature- or anomaly-based IDS and IPS.
●
Full integration with VPN infrastructure: Cisco WAAS automatically adjusts parameters on optimized
connections to help ensure transparent transport through the VPN infrastructure.
●
Disk encryption: You can enable disk encryption selectively or globally, with Cisco WAAS Central Manager
managing disk encryption keys, to help ensure that data written to the Cisco WAAS device disks is
completely unusable if a system is compromised. This behavior helps ensure compliance with Payment
Card Industry (PCI) regulations along with other federal and industry-related compliance initiatives, as
shown in Figure 19.
© 2015 Cisco and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public Information.
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Figure 19.
Cisco WAAS Disk Encryption
Cisco AppNav WAN Optimization Virtualization
Cisco AppNav is a comprehensive and network-integrated WAN optimization solution available with virtualization
technology that drastically reduces operation complexity in enterprisewide WAN optimization deployments. The
Cisco AppNav solution enables customers to virtualize WAN optimization resources in the data center by pooling
them into one elastic resource in a manner that is policy based and on demand with the best available scalability
and performance. It integrates transparently with Cisco WAAS physical and virtual network infrastructure, providing
significant investment protection for existing network design objectives as well as the capability to expand the WAN
optimization service to meet future demands. The Cisco AppNav capability to pool elastic resources also provides
the foundation for migration to cloud services.
The Cisco AppNav solution provides the following benefits:
●
Efficient and cost-effective expansion of WAN optimization services within a company: The Cisco AppNav
solution provides an on-demand pool of Cisco WAAS devices (appliances or virtual appliances or a mixture
of both) that can be used in all data center deployment models.
●
Flexibility in WAN optimization deployment to address various business needs: The Cisco AppNav solution
allows flexible policy definitions that dynamically bind business logical constructs to a set of Cisco WAAS
pools, and it makes intelligent load-distribution decisions based on the state of the nodes currently providing
services.
●
Improved business continuity with highly available Cisco WAAS services: The Cisco AppNav clustering
mechanism enables redundancy in the pool of Cisco WAAS devices and Cisco AppNav services.
●
The Cisco AppNav elastic provisioning and deployment of WAN optimization services along with the
upcoming integration of Cisco AppNav technology into the Cisco Cloud Services Router (CSR) provides a
transparent, optimized connection from the branch office to the cloud.
●
Capability to address challenges posed by today’s data center infrastructure: Cisco AppNav native solutions
address directional asymmetry in the multipath environment of the data center while preserving the userintended network path (network path affinity).
© 2015 Cisco and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public Information.
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Network Interception
Cisco WAAS provides the industry’s most flexible and functionally complete set of network interception and
redirection techniques. Each technique provides efficient integration and interaction with adjacent network devices
to provide stability, scalability, and performance.
●
Physical inline deployment: Using the Cisco inline interception card, you can easily deploy Cisco WAAS
Appliances by simply inserting the Cisco WAAS Appliance in line between the router (or firewall) and the
adjacent switch. With the use of fail-to-wire capabilities, if the Cisco WAAS Appliance experiences a
hardware or software failure, within seconds the appliance will transparently become a bridge and remove
itself from operation. When deploying them in line, you can deploy Cisco WAAS Appliances in a serial
cluster if you want high availability of optimization services. You can deploy serial inline clusters in the data
center as well as in the branch office.
●
WCCP Version 2 (WCCPv2): Cisco WAAS provides full support for WCCPv2, allowing deployment of up to
32 Cisco WAAS devices in a single device group with load balancing, failover, and nondisruptive Cisco
WAAS device insertion and removal. Unlike solutions that implement only a portion of the WCCPv2
specification, Cisco WAAS provides full WCCPv2 compatibility for efficient integration into both the branch
office and data center without compromising performance, scalability, or existing infrastructure.
●
PBR: You can deploy Cisco WAAS in the network using PBR, which defines the Cisco WAAS device as a
next-hop router. PBR allows you to configure multiple Cisco WAAS devices as next-hop routers; you also
can use PBR in conjunction with IP service-level agreements (SLAs) for high-availability failover
configurations.
●
Cisco Nexus vPath interception: The Cisco Nexus 1000V provides virtualization-aware network services to
all application server virtual machines. Central to this capability are port profiles, which are a collection of
interface configuration commands that you can dynamically apply at either physical or virtual interfaces. Any
changes to a given port profile are propagated immediately to all ports that have been associated with it.
Port profiles are visible as VMware port groups in the VMware vCenter management console. The Cisco
Nexus 1000V provides a mechanism for attaching Cisco vWAAS to the port profiles of servers that need to
be optimized. vPath will intercept all traffic to and from these servers and forward it to the Cisco vWAAS
virtual machine for optimization. vPath interception uses Cisco Nexus 1000V port-profile attributes (vn
service) to redirect traffic to Cisco vWAAS. Administrators need to identify the port profiles of servers to be
optimized by Cisco vWAAS. After the port profile is identified, Cisco vWAAS needs to attach to one or
multiple port profiles to optimize the traffic. Cisco WAAS autodiscovery helps ensure that a particular TCP
connection is optimized only by the endpoint devices (Cisco WAVE or Cisco vWAAS).
●
Integrated router (Cisco ISR G2) forwarding: With Cisco WAAS Express on Cisco ISR G2 routers, the
default optimization policy will apply to traffic entering and leaving the interface as soon as the feature is
enabled for those specific interfaces. In this case, there is no need to configure inline or WCCP interception
mechanisms.
Automatic Discovery
Cisco WAAS automatically discovers all Cisco WAAS devices in the path between a source and destination pair.
As each TCP connection is established, Cisco WAAS nonintrusively applies markings to the connection request
packets to identify each Cisco WAAS device in the path between the communicating nodes as well as the
optimizations being requested according to the configured policy. As marked packets are received by the distant
Cisco WAAS device, the topology is learned, and optimization capabilities can then be negotiated.
© 2015 Cisco and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public Information.
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In addition, Cisco WAAS devices can automatically detect Cisco WAAS Central Manager through DNS and
preform an automatic deployment of Cisco WAAS devices at branch offices without any user intervention or
specific configuration. This capability significantly reduces time and OpEx spent at remote sites and enables rapid
deployment of WAN optimization systems.
Cisco WAAS automatic discovery provides the following benefits:
●
No manual topology definition: No tunnel or overlay network definition is required, because Cisco WAAS
devices do not use tunnels and they automatically determine the devices that are in the path, negotiating
optimization levels automatically without the need for administrative configuration.
●
Automatic bypass of intermediary Cisco WAAS devices: Optimization is applied only between the outermost
Cisco WAAS devices to help ensure efficient use of resources and optimal optimization of connections.
Secure, Scalable, Centralized Management with Cisco WAAS
Cisco WAAS deployments are managed through the secure, scalable Cisco WAAS Central Manager. You can
manage up to 2000 Cisco WAAS devices with a single Cisco WAAS Central Manager, which you can also deploy
in a highly available failover configuration. All communications between Cisco WAAS devices and Cisco WAAS
Central Manager are encrypted using SSL to help ensure data privacy.
Figure 20 shows the Cisco WAAS Central Manager dashboard.
Figure 20.
Cisco WAAS Central Manager Dashboard
The new Cisco WAAS 5.0 Central Manager with HTML 5 user-friendly interfaces and improved navigation provides
deeper visibility into application performance and pass-through traffic and better control and monitoring capabilities.
Cisco WAAS Central Manager offers the following capabilities for managing and monitoring your Cisco WAAS
deployment:
●
Highly available, secure platform: All communications among Cisco WAAS devices and Cisco WAAS
Central Manager are encrypted, and you can deploy the central manager itself in a high-availability
configuration with automatic failover.
© 2015 Cisco and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public Information.
Page 24 of 27
●
Scalability: You can deploy multiple Cisco WAAS Central Managers to scale to any number of deployed
Cisco WAAS devices.
●
Configuration simplicity through device groups: Multiple Cisco WAAS devices can belong to a single device
group, and you can apply configuration changes to the device group and then automatically apply them to
the group’s members. The use of device groups reduces the number of clicks necessary to make broadreaching changes to the Cisco WAAS deployment.
●
Customizable, schedulable reports: You can view powerful reporting statistics covering device and system
health, WAN optimization performance, application acceleration performance, and traffic by device, by
device group, and systemwide. You can schedule all reports for automatic delivery using email, and realtime connection statistics are available. Additionally, a monitoring API that uses XML is available to enable
integration into existing monitoring and reporting architectures. Figure 21 shows some of the many powerful
reports that Cisco WAAS Central Manager provides.
Figure 21.
●
Sample HTTP Acceleration and Optimization Reports Provided by Cisco WAAS Central Manager
Centralized policy management: You can centrally manage the optimization and acceleration capabilities of
Cisco WAAS devices through the Application Traffic Policy (ATP) Manager on Cisco WAAS Central
Manager, providing an intuitive policy builder that you can use to define the applications to be optimized and
the levels of optimization to be applied. More than 150 policies are configured by default, supporting today’s
most commonly used applications and protocols.
●
Full role-based access control (RBAC): Cisco WAAS Central Manager provides full RBAC capabilities to
define the users who can interact with the management and monitoring components on specific devices and
whether read or write permissions are allowed. Additionally, you can integrate identity with Microsoft Active
Directory, TACACS, or RADIUS to allow a centralized provider to manage authentication based on user or
group definition.
●
Encryption services: Cisco WAAS Central Manager provides management of encryption services for all
Cisco WAAS devices in the network, including the secure vault for encryption key pairs and the keys
necessary for Cisco WAAS device disk encryption. All sensitive data used or generated by a Cisco WAAS
deployment is stored and transmitted securely.
© 2015 Cisco and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public Information.
Page 25 of 27
●
Integrated application performance monitoring (APM): Cisco WAAS Central Manager includes integrated
performance monitoring capabilities that integrate the Cisco NAM reports that are most relevant to Cisco
WAAS deployment. This feature simplifies the configuration and monitoring processes, expands reporting
capabilities beyond Cisco WAAS visibility to the entire network, and provides end-to-end application
performance analytics and optimization statistics. Figure 22 shows some of the ways in which Cisco WAAS
Central Manager provides application performance visibility.
Figure 22.
●
Cisco WAAS Central Manager Network and Application Performance Analyses
Integrated Cisco AppNav configuration and monitoring: Cisco WAAS Central manager includes an
integrated Cisco AppNav configuration and monitoring capability. This feature provides a comprehensive,
cohesive, and simple interface for configuring, monitoring, and troubleshooting the entire Cisco AppNav
cluster. Figure 23 provides examples of the wizard-guided configuration and comprehensive cluster and
device views that the Cisco WAAS Central Manager interface for Cisco AppNav provides.
Figure 23.
Cisco WAAS Central Manager AppNav Cluster Configuration Wizard and Health Statistics Through 360o Network
View
© 2015 Cisco and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public Information.
Page 26 of 27
Conclusion
IT departments face significant pressure to do more with less: achieve greater application and data availability and
higher levels of performance and throughput, with fewer people and devices and in less time. Application delivery
technologies help IT departments consolidate application infrastructure from distributed sites in the data center
while providing the optimizations necessary to improve application and data-access performance over the WAN.
Along with providing the capabilities necessary to consolidate infrastructure in the data center, Cisco WAAS
provides the capabilities necessary to consolidate infrastructure within the branch office itself for applications that
are deemed necessary. By providing the industry’s most complete set of WAN optimization capabilities, application
acceleration services, and virtualization capabilities, Cisco WAAS helps IT departments meet the challenges of
consolidating costly infrastructure and improving application performance to enable distributed business initiatives.
For More Information
For more information, please visit http://www.cisco.com/go/waas.
Printed in USA
© 2015 Cisco and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public Information.
C17-732248-00
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